Mahjong Solitaire – Often Confused With Traditional Mahjong.

Mahjong Solitaire is a solitaire-type matching game that, instead of cards, uses a set of Mahjong tiles. The tiles come from the popular four player game in Asia known as Mahjong. There are 144 tiles that are arranged most often in specific four or five layer patterns with the faces up.

The goal of Mahjong Solitaire is to match open pairs of identical tiles, removing them from the board. "Open" tiles are those that can be moved either left or right without disturbing any neighbor tiles. As more tiles are removed, they expose more open tiles available for play. The game ends when all of the tiles have been removed from the board, one pair at a time. The game is also finished when there are no exposed, open pairs remaining.

This has become a very popular game to play online, and therefore has mistakenly become confused with the original Mahjong. Whether it is referred to as Mah Jong, Ma Jong, Mah Jongg, Ma Diao, Ma Cheuk, Mah Cheuck, Baak Ling, or Pung Chow, the history of this game is just about as fascinating as the game itself. Origins of the game have been attributed to everyone from Confucius to Noah, having been played on the ark. Although there have been tile games of some sort found in China from around 1120 AD, evidence or any records of mahjong prior to 1900 are non-existent.

In the next 15 years after it emerged into the world, Mahjong spread very quickly across most of China, and slowly into the West, including America. Mahjong is historically recorded as being brought into America by Joseph P. Babcock, a representative of the Standard Oil Company. However, it wasn't until later that it became officially marketed and imported in large quantities.

Today, Mahjong is still very popular and majong tile sets can be found on retail sites such as ebay. However, it has become wildly popular in its online variation of mahjong solitaire, and has evolved into many different variations of the solitaire game. Some of these include Mahjong Connect, towers, medley, and many others, and are readily available on games sites such as Yahoo.